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Saturday, 12 August 2017

World Elephant Day

General
Sir Henry Stamford Raffles raised a large pair of brass-rimmed binoculars to
his eyes and scanned the enemy lines in front of him on the other side of the
battlefield.

A low mist drifted across the black
water craters between the barbed wire lines. Beyond the pitted, churned-up grey
muddy mess of No Man’s Land the men and machines of the Third Reich were
arrayed; everything from standard troopers and Jotun-class tanks to clanking
units of bipedal Landsknechts and even the occasional remade abomination.

The Nazi menace was persistent, he’d
give them that.

Raffles lowered his binoculars,
placing them on the silver tea tray his batman was holding out ready beside him
and picking up the cooling cup of tea next to them. He took a sip, the leather
armchair creaking as he eased his bulk back into it, crossed his ankles on a
footstool in front of him and took in the Magna Britannia forces, of which he
was commander-in-chief, with a proud, rosy-cheeked grin.

To
his left stood the massed ranks of the Galahad and Gawain regiments, ten
thousand automata strong. To his right were arrayed the combined might of
Lancelot and Percival; another ten thousand head of robo-infantry. Supporting
them were the gigantic land battleships Samson
and Atlas, their arms replaced with
mighty cannon and mortars, Gatling guns and iron spear-firing ballistae. He
could hear the mighty roar of their engines as their crews stoked their
boilers, thick black smoke and geysers of white steam rising from their towering
smokestacks. The land battleships of the Wellington Dreadnought Brigade were
indeed a sight to behold, the Britannian flag snapping from the banner-poles in
the chill autumnal wind.

And
there were men of flesh and blood amongst the forces too – weapons crews,
engine teams, stokers, droid handlers, engineers, tacticians, not to mention
the trusted Tommy foot soldier and those men piloting the stalker tanks and
Trojan support vehicles that followed the automaton infantry – but there
weren’t many. Only a couple of hundred compared to the twenty thousand
grunt-bots. And, as General Kensington Gore, the oft quoted First Great
European War general and all round hero, was famously remembered for saying,
“Give me one hundred droids or, failing that, a thousand ordinary men.” But
then he had been virtually half-automaton himself.

It
was a sign of Raffles’ status and rank that he had been afforded the privilege
of leading the Magna Britannian forces at Amiens into battle from atop his own
personalised pachyderm-droid Hannibal.
Before freedom-threatening war had come to the heartlands of Europe for a
second time, he had served in India, where the vision of the monstrous
robo-phant charging the gates of Bombay had sent many a revolutionary fleeing
for his life.

The howdah shading Raffles and his
batman from the weak rays of the milky sun – the commander-in-chief’s command
post might have looked out of place, had it not been for the Magna Britannian
iconography that had been worked into the ornate scrollwork of the giant droid’s
flanks.

Raffles
eased himself back into his chair. He could feel the comforting rumble of the
boiler bubbling in the guts of the metal beast as its own engines were stoked
with coke, ready for action. He was going to enjoy this. It was going to be a
walk in the park, but he was looking forward to it anyway.

Putting
the china cup to his lips at last, he took a sip. He grimaced; the tea was
cold. With a flick of the wrist he sent the contents of the cup raining down
over the side of the pachyderm onto an unsuspecting automaton below. He rattled
the teacup and its saucer back onto the tray.

“Is
the pot still warm?” he asked of his batman, without once taking his eyes from
the battlefield vista in front of him.

He could see sinister airborne
shapes – something like birds and something like flying bombs – circling and
wheeling above the enemy lines. He was comforted by knowledge of the fact that
above his own forces the Darwin Corps’ tamed
Pterosaurshung
from the airborne eyries of the airship Harridan,
ready to swoop down and rend any enemy aerial forces wing from wing.

Lister
put a hand to the silvered teapot sitting on the small stove at the back of the
howdah, testing the temperature. “Yes, sir.”

“Then
poor me another cup.”

“Right
away, sir,” Lister replied dutifully.

“Do you think we’ll win, sir?”
Lister asked as he passed the general a steaming cup. It only remained for the
general to add the cream or lemon as he saw fit.

Raffles turned a withering gaze upon
his batman.

“The Germans are losing this war,
Lister, their resources are stretched to the limit and this is a last ditch
attempt devised by the Führer and his lackeys to hold back the inevitable. Show
some backbone, man! Whatever happened to your stiff upper lip, and all that?
Mark my words, we’ll have this all wrapped up in time for Tiffin. Then we’ll be
in Paris in time for cocktails and Berlin for a little hair of the dog
tomorrow. You mark my words!”

General Sir Henry Stamford Raffles
took a sip. “Ah, that’s much better.” Satisfied, he placed the cup carefully
back on its saucer on the tray, exchanging it for the speaking tube hung on its
trunk-like hose in the bracket on the other side of his chair. He raised the
speaking horn to his mouth.

“Men and automatons of the Magna
Britannian Fourth Cybernetic Expeditionary Company, we march to war, that we
might eradicate the Nazi menace once and for all. We march for Queen and
country! We march for freedom from oppression! The command is given, and that
command is – atta–”

But Sir Raffles’ command to engage
was drowned by a scream of burning air and boiling mist as a beam of
retina-searing light, like fire from heaven, streaked down out of the sky. It
hit the front row of Galahad regiment which vanished in a blinding flash of
concentrated sunlight. The crump of the explosions that followed in the wake of
the beam’s unkind caresses reached Raffles a moment later.

The
flaming spear vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, leaving Raffles blinking
grey supernovae from before his eyes and seeing nothing of the automaton
infantry line but a mass of fused and burning wreckage that might once have
been man-shaped droids.

The beam came again, a sustained
blast this time, taking out the entire front line of Lancelot to his right.

Raffles
was out of his chair now, panic rendering him silent.

The
giant Atlas was the next target of
the devastating death ray, the British colours cooking off its hull plating
under its fiery fury, the Britannia flags flapping from its exhaust stacks
reduced to blackened cinders that were then carried away as glowing orange
embers on the firestorm wind following the beam’s onslaught.

Two
seconds later, the shells inside the giant’s right arm cannon touched off.

The
force of the explosion flattened almost all of Gawain regiment and even
threatened to send the Hannibal
crashing over onto its side, but the pachyderm stood firm, all ten tons of it.

“By
all the saints!” Raffles spluttered as he picked himself up off the floor of
the howdah, his ears ringing. The tray beside his seat was swimming in hot tea
now, the cup tossed over by the force of the explosion. “What the blazes was
th-”

His sentence remained unfinished as
the super-heated death ray found its next target.

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WRITTEN BY JONATHAN GREEN

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Jonathan Green

About Me

I am a freelance writer and editor, well known for my contributions to the Fighting Fantasy range of adventure gamebooks. I have also written for such diverse properties as Sonic the Hedgehog, Doctor Who, Star Wars and Games Workshop's worlds of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000.
I am the creator of the alternative steampunk universe of Pax Britannia, and have written eight novels featuring the debonair dandy adventurer Ulysses Quicksilver.
As well as my fiction work, I have also written a number of non-fiction books including 'Match Wits with the Kids', 'What is Myrrh Anyway? Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Christmas' and 'YOU ARE THE HERO - A History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks'.